My friend is painting a small studio this week. Studio is the name used to describe the smallest rentable living space for two people. In this case it is a tiny commercial premises, next door to the ‘boulangerie’, still awaiting permission to exchange the plate-glass shop front for a more private wall with a window in it. It has, nevertheless been tidily converted by a friend, Matt, and finished with plastered, dry-lined wall panels. It measures three metres across the frontage by no more than four deep yet it has a ‘kitchenette’, a sink unit with an integral cooking plate and a cupboard, a minuscule shower, toilet and hand basin with a sleeping platform fitted above. My friend Alain called by and pronounced it fit for ‘saisonniers’ but not for ‘curistes’ since the only way up to bed is via a wooden ladder. ‘Curistes’ book three weeks in the summer hoping to lose weight, change their lifestyle and become happier people whereas the former are here to survive the season and are not supposed to have enough free time or money to worry about their living conditions. This job, when finished, will look like a display setting in Ikea, Lyon where they love home décor challenges, calling it ‘modern living’ and will fetch around 600 euros a month in rental. I expect this pleases local developers as they work out that they can fit another compact living space into the building.
I live in an F2, the term for a flat which has two rooms as well as the essential services. Having a full width balcony and a cellar adds enormously to the pleasure of this small place but I must admit that it is restrictive and I have had to make some difficult choices regarding furniture. Raising the iron bed by cementing the legs into two-foot sections of steel pipe was a brainwave, an old Savoyard notion and gives me four square metres of usable floor space underneath for storage. It’s already full! I realised recently that the flat is my ‘voodoo’. I don’t need dragons’ teeth hanging round my neck while I have an assortment of potent items on shelves or on the walls in here. I have surrounded myself with objects from previous places, things I felt I could not part with and which have followed me from home to home. Probably it is this, er…clutter which has prevented me from falling for the ‘faux traditional’ look which is found everywhere here. The ‘mountain chalet’ style of decoration is big business – cow bells on leather straps, ‘old’ wooden cupboards with painted doors and ‘heart’ cut-outs, curtains and cushions with snowflakes, deer or marmots embroidered on them in red on white and fretwork, fretwork everywhere This mass of country style furnishings encourages wealthy chalet owners to stuff their second homes with items, useless in the modern context – ornamental hay forks, butter churns, cart wheels, warming pans - all supposed to persuade the visitor of the honest peasant origins of his hosts, since ‘être paysan’ here is carries a certain cachet.
It is quite rare now to come across old barns though most villages have a couple, untouched, their upper storey an airy assembly of loose vertical boards for keeping hay, with maybe stone walls below. Where they do exist, it possibly says more about complex French inheritance laws than local restraint. Mostly the old properties have been renovated very stylishly, keeping lots of exposed wood –oak and larch - and the traditional wall covering (la chaux) which requires real expertise to apply. In the village, my neighbour Laurent recently had his house clad in this way as the finishing touch to his own years of work on his home. Less appealing are the new developments – I have mentioned the ‘lotissement’ at the top of the village – bungalows or in this instance chalets with little charm. They are built to a meagre formula, with ‘less’ in all the ways you would prefer to see ‘more’; windows and doors mere cut-outs, no spare wood or interesting lines, suggesting very plain interiors –still, with lots of fancy furniture, wood-effect flooring and thick curtains, who cares? It is still a backdrop for creating a genuine alpine interior. Nor are they cheap for all their shortcuts. This new housing was originally planned for working people but many are second homes and often closed up. A local couple, both nurses, found every one of these properties was spoken for even before completion.
If you want to see chalets with ‘more’, indeed ‘too much’, then take a tour round Courchevel 1650 and 1850. Courchevel today has some of the most expensive real estate in the world, with chalets carved, painted and curlicued to an exaggerated degree, enough to satisfy the Alpine expectations of the richest Russian or Saudi princess, yet 50 years ago it was a community of simple, pent-roofed wooden homes with few external decorative features, solid and practical to heat. It was the growing popularity of ‘alpine skiing’ and the arrival of the jet-set in the 60’s, clamouring for Swiss and Austrian decoration which started this commercial boom. The ‘Alpine’ look never was the Savoyard way – the terrain and the climate too harsh and the working people too poor. House design traditionally reflected altitude and weather conditions as well as the availability locally of suitable materials; so roof structures, layered with stone slabs called lauzes, were built to withstand months of heavy snow in isolated positions up on the mountain whilst in the villages, the lower altitude permitted houses of a style more similar to town houses anywhere in France, having shutters, ironwork and interesting doorways. Design nowadays shows just what the owner fancies and this is altering the appearance of village homes though most use wood and stone still, with huge overhanging roofs sheltering the upper balconies. Villages are now more obviously ‘done up’. My friend Thierry and his big family live in a large chalet built of ‘rondins’, the whole round logs. He and his brother did most of the work between them though the log sections came ready, grooved and tongued. It’s a fine house and he has refused several enormous cash offers for it. Driving down from 1650 this morning I passed a couple of unfinished chalets, left to cope with winter without their topcoats on! They appear to be made out of green polystyrene panels. This is the local insulating material; the reinforced concrete structure has the timberwork for windows and door casements left proud by at least 15 centimetres to receive these insulation slabs and then later the walls are clad in wood or stone. Sometimes much later.
Down in Brides, the painting job is practically finished now and shows off the hand - plastered walls and bare wood very well. Standing in the centre of this tiny studio and currently covered with an old sheet, are a large radiator, a wardrobe and a traditional cupboard with its fold-down tabletop, … but I am left wondering where on earth they will put the two people, never mind the genuine old ploughshare, the set of hay hooks and the cowbells!
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copyright Julia Austen 2015